A CRIME REVISITED: THE DECISION

A CRIME REVISITED: THE DECISION; 13 YEARS LATER, OFFICIAL REVERSAL IN JOGGER ATTACK

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN and SUSAN SAULNY

Published: December 6, 2002

Thirteen years after a Central Park jogger was beaten and raped on a night of teenage violence that horrified New York, prosecutors pointed to a convicted killer yesterday as the probable lone rapist and asked a court to throw out all the convictions of five Harlem men whose graphic but unsupported confessions had sent them to prison.

In a remarkable turn in the infamous case, the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, submitted to State Supreme Court a report on new evidence that not only presaged a reversal of the convictions early next year but also appeared to raise the curtain of mystery that has long shrouded the events in the park on the night of April 19, 1989. [Excerpts, Page B6.]

The prosecutor's report reopened a window on 1989, an era of rampant crime and racial tensions in New York that had generated a climate of fear and a sense of vulnerability in a citizenry that felt helpless against marauding teenagers in the streets, subways and parks.

Contradicting a longstanding theory that the jogger had been gang-raped, the report said that an 11-month re-examination of the case had found DNA and other persuasive evidence that the woman had been brutally beaten, raped and left for dead by one man, Matias Reyes, a murderer and serial rapist who confessed last January that he alone had attacked the jogger.

The report, a motion by Nancy E. Ryan, Mr. Morgenthau's chief of trials, to join the defense in seeking a dismissal of all charges, said that a fresh look at the confessions of Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Kharey Wise, and a reconstruction of the events that night suggest that the youths could not have raped the jogger because they were elsewhere in the park, assaulting, robbing and harassing joggers, bikers and others, on a night of what one suspect called wilding, a term police investigators had never heard before.

The report also said that the convicted youths' confessions -- videotaped, written and so powerful that they persuaded two juries who had heard almost no other evidence -- were actually so full of discrepancies and errors regarding the rape, even about where, when and how it took place and who was involved, as to make the statements implausible as evidence of the rape.

In addition, the report said, many details in the confessions were never corroborated. None of the DNA evidence linked the youths with the jogger, for example, and their descriptions of her clothing and injuries, the weapons used and other details were at odds with the facts. The report also noted that these weaknesses were not exploited by defense lawyers in two trials.

The report said nothing about investigators' using coercion or trickery to obtain the confessions, as supporters of the convicted men have charged. But it suggested that the youths' statements regarding the rape -- each minimizing his own role while implicating others -- might have amounted to false claims by the teenagers trying to become witnesses rather than defendants.

The report also undercut the only physical evidence offered by prosecutors in the trials to link the youths directly to the jogger. It said that strands of hair found on Mr. Richardson and on another youth who was charged but never prosecuted in the rape had been shown in recent DNA tests not to have come from the jogger, though prosecutors had exploited them in the trials as matching or ''consistent with'' hers.

The report contained no sweeping admonitions about a miscarriage of justice, and did not portray the convicted men as innocents who committed no crimes in the park on the night of the rampage. But in an avalanche of facts, it focused narrowly on legal grounds and argued that, given the new evidence, the verdicts probably would tip in the defendants' favor if new trials were to be held.

But in carefully constructing an argument that the five men had been wrongly convicted, the report made no attempt to assign blame for how it happened, and it did not criticize, or even name, any of the detectives and prosecutors who handled the case, one of the most important in Mr. Morgenthau's 29-year tenure.

Besides the dismissal of rape and assault charges in the jogger case, the report recommended that the men's convictions for other assaults, robberies and crimes that night should also be set aside. While there was ample evidence to show they were part of a pack of 30 youths who beat and harassed eight other victims, the report said the youths had been portrayed in court as predators in a vicious sexual assault, and thus jurors' perceptions of them would have been tainted for judgments on the secondary charges.

''We conclude that there is a probability that the new evidence, had it been available to the juries, would have resulted in verdicts more favorable to the defendants, not only on the charges arising from the attack on the female jogger but on the other charges as well,'' the 58-page report concluded.

While Mr. Morgenthau approved the report, he made no comment yesterday and declined requests for interviews. Elizabeth Lederer, who led the prosecution in two trials in 1990, and Linda Fairstein, who oversaw the prosecution as chief of the sex crimes unit, also made no comment.